Yesterday we did a piece on the Top Ten Reputation Management Tips, detailing 10 things you really should be doing to preserve your own/brand name on t’internet. And, while we freely admit that the list wasn’t exhaustive, there are also some things which – equally as importantly – you should NOT be doing. Whilst amicable that you should wish to fix any issues that may arise, within you is the potential to make things a whole lot worse, too.

The following are examples of the top 10 things not to do to manage your own reputation. When they say the road to ruin is paved with good intentions, they’re talking about this list:

1/ Don’t Engage In Bad Business Practices

Yeah, like, duh. You shouldn’t even need to be reminded of this (and most of you don’t), but the quickest way of landing yourself in hot bother is by making bad ethical business choices. But it’s not just your archetype evil business tycoon that’s prone to doing this, it’s pretty much anyone that runs a business. The economy is utter trash at the moment and making cuts is necessary for a lot of people, but you need to be careful what you’re making cuts to. If you’re cutting corners on normal business procedures, customer service, customer aftercare (for example) – it will reflect reflect badly on you and it will get out. The safest bet you can make is that nothing you do is guaranteed to stay private, or behind closed doors, and that for every irate customer or business partner it’s a potential bad story appearing on the internet. Just think “Should this get out, how would this reflect on me/the company?” and you’ll make far fewer bad judgement calls.

2/ Don’t Rush To Admit You Are Wrong

Seems a bit of a u-turn on that last one, doesn’t it? Well, no, not really. We’re not suggesting that you intentionally hide mistakes, mishaps or unfortunate coincidences, but rushing an apology doesn’t always help either. If something happens and you’re perceived to be at fault, showing a bit of humility and holding your hands up might go a way towards clearing your conscience. But that’s about all the benefit it’ll have, as admitting liability publicly is the only thing anyone’s going to hear. Sure, you might have a solution – you may have already sorted the situation out – but the minute you say “Yeah, our bad”, the only thing you’ll hear about is that you/your company has admitted complacency. And regardless of what the problem was, or how great you were at rectifying the situation, the headlines will all read “[Company Name] Admits Fault”. IF something happens, don’t feel like you have to be brutally honest and hope people will respect you for it. Sort the problem, and issue holding statements (i.e. “We are aware of the issue and are working towards resolving it. We will be issuing a full statement in due course.”) until you can confidently say that the issue is behind you. At which point, acknowledge the existence of the issue, explain what the issue was, how you fixed it, and what provisions are in place to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

3/ Don’t Ignore Misdirected Negative Content

“He aint talkin’ about me” logic doesn’t work. Not when it comes to businesses, and not when it comes to preserving your reputation. It’s all well and good safeguarding against your brand/company name receiving negative attention and taking measures, but is that enough? Well, say you ran a company called Big Mike’s Tyres and had a solid reputation. Congratulations. Unfortunately, a few streets away some guy is running a company called Big Mike’s Tiles and, well… his reputation isn’t as good. In fact, he’s pretty much a cowboy; he rips people off and does a terrible job installing new tiles. So naturally, a lot of people take to the internet to complain about him. But, because of keyword similarities, his bad press is appearing on searches for your company. And, if anyone sees a story saying “Big Mike Ripped Me Off!”, you think that each of them are going to take the time to distinguish between different companies? It’s also not completely beyond the realms of possibility that somebody’s going to see the article about Big Mike ripping people off, assume it’s talking about you, and write their own piece criticizing your company. I hate the use of clichés, but don’t let yourself be put in the position of ‘guilty by association’.

4/ Don’t Threaten Legal Action

Speaking of clichés, I also strongly dislike the “exception to every rule” concept. There are undoubtedly going to be exceptions to this one, but you should at least know what you’re getting yourself into. There’s ultimately no definitive answer to the prevention of negative content arising, but there are certainly rules about how you should conduct yourself when it does. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is threatening legal action against authors/publications out of anger. What they’re saying might well be defamation, it might be inaccurate, it might be a whole lot of things that make you look bad, but you can’t get angry about it. Or, at least not outwardly so. You might even have legal grounds  to have it removed, but have you consulted legal counsel? If there are legal implications, leave it to the solicitors to sort. That’s what they’re paid to do. Once you threaten legal action, you make it a far bigger story. Bigger stories attract more attention, and not just from readers. Once a topic becomes popularized, everyone will want a piece, and so instead of one piece of negative content, you’ve got ten people writing about the original story with the extra bit about your ill-advised response. It used to be a concern that when a story got out, people would hear about it. Now though, you need to be far more concerned with who writes about it. Don’t give them the ammunition they need to make their story any better.

5/ Don’t Try To ‘Pay-Off’ Bloggers

Generally speaking, Bloggers write about whatever they want. A lot of amateur writers also feel that in order to maintain a ‘cutting edge’ to their work, they can only do so by being overly and often cynically critical of others. So yeah, you might at one stage find yourself at the receiving end of a good tongue-lashing, compliments of RandomBlogger569. His article is highly critical, unfairly bias and at points is blatant fabrication. How dare he?! Right, what can you do? Well, as established above – threatening legal action is out. What about trying to pay him off? This guy writes blogs as a hobby, and using his words to try and get attention and is rambling on hoping to cause a scene. How much bigger do you think the ‘scene’ is going to be once he’s written a follow-up post about the guy he wrote about trying to bribe him to remove his content? The best advice is not to respond (rather than fan the flames) and take the usual RM steps to ensure it doesn’t get the attention it deserves.

6/ Don’t Argue On Review Sites

There are review sites all over the internet covering practically every subject under the sun (and some above it too). This is the by-product of Web 2.0 and the User Generated Content generation. This is mainly because people have found they can make a lot of money off of hosting a platform for people to share their experiences/opinions. It requires very little effort, as people will now actively seek out a website they can share their thoughts on; and the more people who share their thoughts, the more people will look to the site as a point of reference. And, with that kind of traffic, comes advertising revenue. So these sites are out to make money and they don’t care who is made to look bad in the process. As such, there might come a time when people take to one (or many) of these sites to write about you. Which, you know, if you’re perfect in every possible way, is most likely to be positive content (though still not guaranteed). Sometimes though, people just want to rant. Let them rant – they’re doing what they think they need to do to feel better. If you start replying in an attempt to refute what’s being said, you’ll look petty. It doesn’t matter if you’re right or not, there can be no good from arguing with somebody on the internet. Under any circumstances. It will look unprofessional, it’ll grant greater credence to what’s being said and you’ll make a bigger thing out of it than it needs to be.

7/ Don’t Post On 3rd Party Forums

A successful politician will, when questioned, often ignore the premise of a question altogether and respond with an answer that sounds like it’s answering, but is actually deflecting on to different matters entirely. They do this not just to be awkward, but because they know that if they answer the question directly, they’re acknowledging that the question has a degree of validity. If negative content starts appearing for searches on your name/company/products in the form of forums, the worst thing you can do is respond to it. For one, it’ll just prolong the story. If you’re taking the proper Reputation Management measures, the story will disappear soon enough, but not if you answer/get caught up in active discussions. For every time you issue a response, you’ll get (at least) one response which counters everything you’ve just said. Your choices then are to continue arguing (with everyone) which is going to make you look just as unprofessional as getting into debates on review sites, or stop posting. At which point, they’ll have won the argument, you’ll have lost and you’ll look worse for it. It’s like thinking “water puts out fires, water is a liquid; paraffin is liquid, I’ll use paraffin to put out this fire”. Yeah, good luck with that.

8/ Don’t Fret Over Neutral Content

Wouldn’t it be nice if everything everyone said about each other was nice, supportive and gratifying? Well, besides from being boring, it just wouldn’t make an awful lot of sense. Nothing and nobody is perfect, and so if you wangle S.E.O. (Search Engine Optimization) to reflect nothing but positive content, it might look artificial and suspicious. Sure, get rid of negative content, but what about all the pieces that are ultimately indifferent? Some people are so paranoid about looking good that they’ll try and manipulate everything that doesn’t imply butter wouldn’t melt in their mouth away from the top rankings in the likes of Google and Yahoo. There are those that are of the mindset that if something isn’t singing their praises, it’s making them look bad. This is crazy. Not only does neutral content (or ‘Swiss Content’) make related searches pertaining to your name/company look more natural, but if it’s ranking high it’s helping to push the negative content down too. Leave it alone.

9/ Don’t Post Compromising Pictures

We said yesterday that it’s good to share pictures. And, while we don’t like blowing our own trumpets, we were right. Sharing pictures will at time help put a face to a name, make people feel a closer, a more human connection to your business. That’s great, you’re human too after all. You lead a life outside of work, just like your customers. You socialize, you have parties, you… Oh, wait! Don’t you still have those pictures from the Thanksgiving  party you had after-hours at the office last year? That was such a good party! Remember when Rodney from Accounts had a few too many to drink and tripped over the carpet and landed face first into Deborah? How you all laughed! Wouldn’t people think you were great people if you showed them you were just like them? No. Rightfully or not, when people give their custom to a company, they hold them to higher, professional moral standards. It’s due to a need for trust, and they need to trust that you’re being professional at all times and they can rely on you to deliver the goods/service they expect. If you show them any pictures which cast doubt over that trust, or cast any aspersions over the professional integrity of your business, they’ll likely not give you their custom/take their money elsewhere. And this is the internet, there’s nothing people like more than a potential scandal.

10/ Don’t Contribute To Wikipedia

Last on this list, but often the top of Google searches. A lot of people assume that if they can make a Wikipedia page, or add to a Wikipedia page, that’ll be a high-ranking page for related searches. This almost always backfires. First of all, it’s difficult to create a Wikipedia entry dedicated to a company or business that’ll pass the requirements to feature in the online encyclopedia. Most pages get removed pretty quickly anyway, making any effort to write a piece a waste of time. But then, we’re forgetting the main point of Wikipedia. It’s the ultimate UGC website. It’s comprised almost entirely of user-generated content as, the ‘beauty’ of it is that literally anyone can edit it. An email and password later, and any Tom, Dick or Harry could edit what you’ve written. You could have said the nicest, brightest thing about your company and an 11-year-old could edit the article, and add the story (or cited references to the story) you’ve been trying to cover up in the first place. And all of a sudden, there it is – at the top of Google results page. And we can guarantee you – as hard as it is to bury random bloggers or news columnists, getting rid of Wikipedia entries is infinitely more difficult.

Again, this list is probably not the be-all and end-all of everything-you-could-possibly-do-to-shoot-yourself-in-the-foot, but it’s a good start. The trick is just to keep in mind “in what way is this likely to backfire?” and a bit of common sense should keep you on the straight and narrow. Sure, doing any of the above would certainly be considered a mistake but not an unrecoverable one. If you have any issues and aren’t sure how to proceed, get in touch with us – as ever, details are on the home page.

The first rule of how you deal with negative comments on a forum about your company is under NO circumstances respond to any comments.  If you do then your opening a can of worms.  Forums are normally places where joe blogs can blow off steam and vent their issues.  The last thing they want is somebody from “the company” defending themselves.

There are 3 good reason not to respond on a forum:

1. Forums are normally driven by people who have an issue or like a good discussion.  The last thing an annoyed customer wants is someone from the company defending themselves.  We have seen this in previous cases with clients who try to tackle such threads in forums are suddenly attacked and not just from the customer but also from other people who just love adding negative comments.
2. By adding to the discussion you are also making the page become active and therefore encouraging Google to rank the page / thread higher up in their such results (and no google will not remove these search resultswithout a court order).  The reason for this is google is trying to show the most relevant pages for a keyword, so if it sees a site with lots of activity then its more likely going to show that page higher up.  That’s why sites like wikipedia do so well because of all the activity on the site and the endless amount of pages and content.
3. You cannot control the content on a forum, so don’t even start a thread about your company as it won’t take long for negative comments to appear if not from a disgruntled customer then from a competitor (I know sounds sly and just because you would not do it to your competitors does not mean they have the same moral standards).

So how do you deal with negative comments on a forum? 

It can depend on the actual content in the forums, if it is slanderous then there is case to contact the site owner and ask for it to be removed before you take legal action.  Another way is to do a whois check and find out who owns the domain and who hosts it.  You can sometimes contact the hosting company who in turn if they agree with you can pull the whole site offline until the negative content is removed.

When emailing the site owner of the forum, add this “email is confidential” in all correspondence, do not add any comments to the actual threads.

Reputation management preventative measures

The best way to avoid these types of issues is of course through reputaion management preventative measures, what I mean by this is by owning the first couple pages of Google with your own positive content.  So if you have a blog make sure you keep it up to date.  If you have social network accounts keep them up to date and so on.  It is time consuming but well worth it, we of course can help manage you reputation online and can also help advise and remove negative content from the first page in Google.

How long does it take to remove negative content?

This can really depend on a few factors:

1. How competitive the keyword is we are trying to protect
2. How much authority the forum has, is it an old page / site, does it have lots of content and activity and so on
3. What Internet presence you already have and how much resources you have to help provide content.

We would normally expect to be getting good results within 3 to 6 months, sometimes quicker.  We do this in many ways but the bulk of it is by filling the net and feeding it with positive content.